Using Find & Select to Remove Blanks in Excel

The video guide shows how to use Find & Select on the Home ribbon to locate all blanks in a column of data. Blank rows can be unhelpful as a lot of Excel functions, such as auto-filling formulas or auto-applying filters, will only get applied up to the next blank row. If you have only selected a single cell, Excel assumes operations such as removing duplicates should be applied to something known as the Current Region. If you are unsure what the Current Region is, then you can use the Find & Select->Go To Special method from the video to identify it.

One problem with using Find & Select to remove blank cells is that you need to give Excel a range within which to identify blank cells. If your data starts in row 10 of a worksheet, you may not wish to select then delete any blank cells at the top of the sheet. The solution is to select the entire column then hold CTRL down whilst selecting those cells above the header of your table. This deselects the cells. When you then Find & Select the blanks, Excel will only select the blanks from row 10 onwards. The same technique can be used to exclude rows from the Find & Select function elsewhere in the worksheet.

An alternative method for removing rows containing blank cells is to select and sort the entire range containing the blank cells. An alphabetical sort automatically moves blanks to the bottom of the data. They can then be deleted with a single selection as a single action. This can be efficient when the blank cells are only in one column of a wider data table that contains some data in every row, and where the current order of the data has no great significance. It will be slower if the blank rows are preventing you from selecting the range to be sorted in the first place.

By Ed Bolton, founder of Excel4Business Ltd. Last reviewed October 2026.